


igneous

by gillfrond



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, becoming pala-din is a trip, questionable content - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-12-03 18:14:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11537760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gillfrond/pseuds/gillfrond
Summary: Here, it happens differently: Samot does not make his offer, Tabard does not meet his end at the sword of Hadrian renewed, and the Sword of Samothes is left behind to turn to stone.





	igneous

The Sword of Samot does not kill you. Not outright. His will forces you to your knees and bows your head in deference, in resignation, and he drives his blade through your chest. You can see yourself, Sword of Samothes, in that grand mirror, see the blood soak into your gambeson, see where the sleeve of your tunic is in tatters where the pala-din soldier drove his sword down to marrow and marble. 

You see yourself die. 

You are still conscious when your friends leave you behind for promise of safety. You are still conscious when the rest of the pala-din disappear, their duty fulfilled, because you are in the City of First Light, now, and it is time for them to go home. You are still conscious when Samot comes to stand behind you and smile in radiant silence, when Samot kneels and drapes his cloak over your shoulders, when Samot whispers something you are too far gone to hear and the marble starts to stitch flayed skin back together. 

You are still conscious when you breathe your last and the moment is unremarkable, insignificant, cruelly mundane. Stone closes around your lungs like a vice and every part of you stops. Death is supposed to be some other place. Death is supposed to be a field of stars and the sound of waves on the shore. Death is supposed to come and take you away. 

But the Defender of the True King said you would make a good pala-din, and pala-din can mend. 

Give it time. 

Give it days, give it a week. Kneel there on the cold stone and listen to the heavy weight of silence around you because your vision is nothing more than blurred colors and bursts of static. Feel a crawling, growing itch sweep over you like a wave. You wonder, because you can, because there is nothing else to do, if you should rouse yourself, if you should be moving, if someone should have come and taken you home. 

You feel like a dead weight, like the armor you used to wear, like the stories of hollow spirits taking up homes in great suits of steel plates and lighting up all the joints with hellfire. You wonder—day five, and the mirror has yet to show Velas again, show anything other than the Officer of the Order of Eternal Princes, frozen in place—if you are a vengeful spirit, too, pinned to a body that has forgotten how to die, too proud to move on. 

You know what is happening, but you are trying very hard to deny it. 

* * *

On the eighth day you are caged. Sound comes back all at once and there is a voice calling for your imprisonment, ringing out like a bell. Here, in the tower where they left you, in the cages set up around the marble table someone once had to drag through the ice and the snow, you become an exhibit. Get to your feet. Stretch, feel no stiffness, no ache. Pace. Breathe, somehow, and revel in the fact that you still can. There are only a handful of soldiers still here, scouting and scavenging, but they are enough to make you feel watched, guarded. 

One of them is Tabard Alon. 

Watch carefully, soldier. Busy yourself with exploring the damage from the last fight, pacing the breadth of your enclosure in broad strides, watching your keeper from between the bars. There should be the marks from vicious blows patterned over your chest, and the meat of your arm pared away to the bone (the Sword of Samot is perched on the edge of the table, drumming his fingers against the marble, observing in silence). There should be scars from years of combat, a familiar lattice carved into your skin (the Defender of the True King does not stir when his lieutenants come to report, sending them away with a gesture). 

What you find is that you are something other than stone; still warm brown skin laid over petrified flesh, still a rhythmic beat inside the brittle shell closed over your heart. You are igneous, not metamorphic. Your arm is cool marble and the rest of you is veined through with pearl where it had wounds to seal but when you pick away at the seams, driven by an itch that flares and settles and flares again like the rise and set of the sun, you find basalt. Deeper, deeper, where the marble is still closing up your arm and you can press through to bone at your shoulder, you see a foundation of patterned diorite. Black stone to your core, founded in fire. 

Samot is placid and unreadable when he comes to visit, the mirror of the soldiers he commands, but your god is a forge inside you and Samothes has always been volcanic. 

(And through all this, as the days wax and wane, sunlight glimpsed through cracks in the tower wall and gleaming reflections on passing pala-din— 

—Tabard never takes his eye off you.) 

* * *

The first time you came here, to the makeshift headquarters of Samot’s forces, these cages were full of people like you. Not stone-carved but grown, the cage a cocoon for their metamorphosis. It sticks in your mind. There were some, not as far gone as you are now, slumped against the bars to wait while the marble spread out from pockmarked spear thrusts or grand sweeping slashes or the serpentine smoke of a bruise around their throat. And others were nearly there. 

You did not know, then, that you should be memorizing every detail of their displays, too caught up in the revelations to notice anything at all, but you remember—one broad and towering figure frozen in some idle pose like a prideful monument, one lithe creature streaked all over with black iron flaws and prowling around their cage like a predator, a feral glint in amethyst eyes. You expect something like this. You wait for days expecting your muscles to seize or your humanity to falter. You tell yourself you are ready. 

Instead, what you feel is fire. The forge of your god has always been a warm glow in your gut but now, eleven days in and too early for the real metamorphosis to start, it is stoked to a blaze and consuming you. And despite yourself you are thankful. You offer praise to the heavens as you feel the burn and sear eat away at bone, blood, resolve, restraint. Being pala-din is perdition made flesh and this is an act of Samothes, this is recognition of the faithful, this is judgment, redemption, salvation. 

It is lava surging like the rush of the tide, devouring and drowning, and you pray that it is enough to kill you. 

You do not notice when Tabard Alon leaves, but you notice when Samot arrives, because in your desperation and delirium the colors all blur together and you see the radiant shape of the Once and Future King. This is your deliverance, paladin. Fall to your knees and thank him in a voice that rasps and crackles like a bonfire. 

“Samothes,” you say, and the figure smiles. “God-King, Artificer Divine, Undying Fire, hear my prayers and grant me mercy—” and on, and on, till the words falter in your throat, till you forget which god you are meant to be praying to. 

The figure of your god is silent—but he reaches a hand through the bars and runs fingers through your hair, gentle, soothing, and the touch is cold as ice. 

When he leaves, you hear the distant baying of hounds, and you weep. 

* * *

Your right arm is lifeless below the elbow, something that only makes itself known once the worst of it passes and you are allowed out of your enclosure. It is supposed to be brief, a breath of fresh air and back inside to wait out the rest of the week in peace; you are supposed to put three weeks’ desperation aside and play along. You are flanked by a pair of pala-din armed to the teeth and Tabard’s watchful eye is fixed on yours as you pass but you are the Sword of Samothes, and fighting is in your blood, and you have come too far to acquiesce now. 

Here, soldier: drive your elbow into the gut of the pala-din to your right and listen to stone grind on stone. Turn, wrench the sword from his grasp with your left hand, step towards him. You fight better right handed so pass the blade over, a practiced exchange, close black-ribboned fingers around the hilt and— 

—the blade clatters to the floor and you are down before you can register it. One pala-din pinning you to the tile and the other driving his boot into your ribs. Tabard stands and watches and then laughs, kicks the sword away and crouches down in front of you. 

“Well,” he says, and his voice is low and rough and brimming with amusement. He is breaking three weeks of silence, and he is doing it to  _laugh_  at you. “Perhaps you should give your escape plan a little more thought, next time.” 

You want to spit at his feet, scream out something venomous, but for the moment at least all your will and words have left you. When the pala-din return you to your cage at a nod from Tabard, surprisingly gentle in their treatment, you do not have it in you to fight back. 

When the other pala-din leave, the Sword of Samot takes up his post at the gate, watching you with a predatory shadow in his gaze. He flexes his fingers, balls them into a fist and you brace on instinct—and you do not notice until you uncoil the tension in your gut and settle hunched shoulders that your own hand is clenched around an imaginary blade. By the time you look up again he is gone, and your fingers have relaxed into a careless gesture, like a statue carved in repose. 

And you decide that you hate him, because hating is easy. You hate him for hurting and humiliating you and turning you into something so far from human. You hate him for  _this_ , for the incompatible seam between marble and andesite, for the dead weight of limestone and iron, for making you more like  _him_. 

You hate him for the way his voice resonated in you. All of you. The part of you that is pala-din, freezing the breath in your lungs and demanding you serve—and the part of you that is Hadrian, who misses his friends, who is starting to forget what prayers to Samothes are supposed to sound like. 

You are nothing alike, you tell yourself, over and over again. You are nothing alike. 

You are nothing alike. 

* * *

Here, after twenty-nine days at the mercy of this metamorphic plague, catalogue the damage. They let you roam free as soon as the fire shows signs of dying down, settling to a simmer and then extinguished entirely, but the only worthwhile mirror here is in that fateful room and your feet will not take you there. Not yet. Work from memory, instead. Mark off where scars should be, where skin should give way to ribbons of pearl. Ignore your arm, the same way you have been for the past week of isolation. 

The seams at your elbows, picked to shreds and worn down further—brush your hand along the joints and feel the grooves left behind by the itch that still half eats away at you. Sandpaper knuckles from the day you spent driving your fists into the tile floor, bloodied with wisps of dust and marble, after Samot came to visit the second time and you understood what it meant to be humiliated. Welts and bruises and vicious scratches on the diorite bone around your left eye, when the pala-din in you saw the clean-carved hole in place of the eye Tabard lost to Throndir’s called shot and demanded you follow suit. 

You can still see as well as ever. The damage ran deep at the time but there was enough of  _you_  left to pull yourself back from tearing your own eye out. You are nothing alike, but part of you knows keenly that pala-din reflect their leader, and despite everything, it wants to be a mirror. 

But Tabard is gone, now. The Defender of the True King left fully-armed two days ago without a word of explanation to you—not that one has ever been offered, not that you have ever been allowed anything other than a passing glance—and you wonder about his return. The pala-din run just as efficiently without him. They follow patrol paths and bring back curious salvage which they pile on the war table in tidy, categorized stacks. Books at one end, the few tomes not weathered by age or conflict; copper-wrought trinkets and ceremonial blades at the other. 

The swords are all intricate woven gold or carved bone and you know one good strike would snap them in half, so you go without. You have armor now, at least, something to hide your blood-stained gambeson and disguise the marks of the metamorphosis; a pala-din presses it into your chest as you try to leave, with an insistence you might mistake for concern in anything other than one of Samot’s toy soldiers. It is resplendent, and so are you: a gleaming idol of silver and steel, vines and leaves and wooden grooves traced over the pauldrons and the plackart in copper relief. 

You do not look like a fighter, like a pala-din, like the man who was on his knees at the mercy of their commander. You look like the right hand of a god. 

The change in the other pala-din is immediate. You venture into the now-familiar halls of the toppled tower and when you return the soldiers snap to attention like they never did with Tabard. You ask no questions, give no orders. You say nothing, in fact, the words stuck in your throat, but it does not seem to matter. When they disperse they are purposeful, heads high, marching in step, and you do not notice your fingers tapping out the rhythm of their stride on your tasset. 

“Ah,” comes a voice laced with magic and with fortitude, and the sound erodes you. Your will is a crumbling cliffside and he is bearing down on you like a hurricane and you turn, despite yourself, in spite of yourself. “I see you’ve taken well to it.” 

He had a beard, the last time you saw him, trimmed down to rough stubble; he had a deep hollow where his eye used to sit, covered over now with a patch embroidered in gold thread. Black cloth marked with a book and a goblet and a sword behind it all. It brands him unique and it thrills you through with a foreign, parasitic  _jealousy_. 

You imagine your hands around his neck. You imagine one of those salvaged knives at his throat. But when the Sword of Samot inclines his head you bow, the young god’s borrowed cloak falling over your shoulder, and say, “It is an honor to serve the True King.” 

And Tabard smiles. 

**Author's Note:**

> the mark of the erasure is full of opportunity, full of gates and windows and great silver mirrors that show something a little different. but in this case, the thing that the mirror is showing is a couple of statues making out. weird, right?


End file.
